Embedded Executive Podcast

Software is becoming the new firmware. If you believe that, as Bob Scaccia, President and CEO of USA Firmware does, we are at the beginning of a new era, and we had better be prepared for it. What the heck does all that mean? To understand it better, I asked Bob to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI at the Edge is now in vogue. But it presents a fundamental problem in that higher compute performance is needed, yet there are many constraints at the Edge, including size, weight, power, and cost. Each of those constraints presents its own unique problem. To understand how to design at the Edge, I spoke to Steven Wu, Vice President of the Research and Development Center at DFI in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I think the embedded industry and its associated technology is very cool. Call me a geek if you must. But every once in a while, I come across a technology that takes “cool” to a completely different level. That occurred this week when I interviewed Florian Bohn, the Co-Founder and CEO of GuRu Wireless. The company is close to commercializing wireless charging, where the charging is done at a distance of a few feet. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and let me know if you agree with the cool factor.

Synaptics just made a hefty acquisition if you’re a player or follower of the IoT space. The company acquired the Wireless Connectivity division of Broadcom. To understand what that means and how it can affect the embedded space, I invited Vineet Ganju, a Vice President at Synaptics as my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. The biggest takeaway for me is that this space is about to get a little more interesting.

SECO USA does not produce ventilators. However, its customers do. As a result, SECO USA forged a partnership to produce, manufacture, and donate those ventilators to needy hospitals in the US. It’s great to see things like this, when so many people are in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Greg Nicoloso, the CEO of SECO USA explained, the company doesn’t want to be a medical-device supplier, but they do want to be a supplier to the companies that supply medical devices. Greg does a great job of explaining all of this on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Wi-SUN Alliance has been around for nearly a decade. The group was formed to develop testing and certification standards for connecting to IoT networks. It has its own wireless spec, which may or may not be confusing, depending on who you are and who you’re talking to. To eliminate the confusion for me and our readers, I interviewed Phil Beecher, President of the Wi-SUN Alliance in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Thankfully, he set me straight.

The goal of the Embedded Executives podcast is to educate our readers about the issues that are of concern to a design engineer/developer. One executive that’s seen just about every situation a developer might encounter is Rory Dear, the Managing Director of DSL. As such, I ran through a litany of issues with Rory, getting his opinion on everything from NRE to open source.

5G requires more radios. Playing devil’s advocate, does that mean there are many more points of failure? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? That’s what I asked Piyush Sevalia, an Executive Vice President at SiTime, who joined me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Tracing of products is an important function. It can be used for everything from property loss to food and medicine whereabouts, and lots of stuff in between. Another interesting application for tracing, especially in our new normal, is knowing when people are practicing social distancing. Wiser Systems specializes in tracing, so I wondered whether its technology could be used to track people. That’s where the conversation started with Logan Maxwell, the company’s Director of Technical Sales in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There is an explosion of data, thanks to COVID-19. I heard that recently, and it surprised me. I could not understand the relationship between the two, so I went to someone who has to deal with that huge increase, Virtium. My guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast is Jacques Issa, a Senior Vice President at the company. And once he explained it to me, it was somewhat of a “Duh!” moment.